Has anyone ever had their Windows display a message saying that the “BOOT_VOLUME_"UNAVAILABLE( <—Something to that effect…)...
Ihave been trying to help my aunt from the cost and frustration of going to BestBuy to have them scrape her data off of her hard drive because she has critical information on it that she cant suffer to lose….And…unfortunately she never made any backups of it aside from putting it on her desktop…  ... Anyone know a way to retrieve files from a system like that?  I now once the boot volume goes it is virtually impossible but…maybe??... GR00VY…I would definitely be talking to you on this one because you are the ultimate master of Windows…Drachen as well… 
I heard once that there was a way to install a half complete Windows 2000 partition and that it would give you access to the files on a Windows XP system…but i think that it was assuming that the Windows Xp was fully operational…just a password was preventing a user from access to the files… (Yea it was a hack site sorta…but look…it could come in very handy in a very LEGAL way :wink: )  SO…

IF ANYONE COUD HELP ME OUT ON THIS ONE…THANK YOU  :|

sorry to hear that.. always schedule backups because data recovery is just a pain for and way too expensive!! :evil:

It really depends on what’s causing that error message to appear. If it simply can’t boot due to a corrupted boot sector then you could try the following:

Plug the “bad” hard disk into another computer that already has Windows 2K or XP running. You should be able to see the data assuming it’s not already corrupted. If you can see it then dump as much data as you can over to the other hard disk.

or

You could also try to “repair” the current installation assuming you have the OS install discs or install a “parallel” version of the OS on that same hard disk. For instance, instead of reinstalling the OS to the same C:\WINDOWS directory, you could use C:\WINXP. That will leave the existing files alone and install a fresh copy in another directory.

I prefer the first option first since it’s less messy but it assumes you have another system laying around.

Of course, if the disc is physically failing then these techniques may not be that useful. See what works better for you and let us know what happens.

Or you could use the XP CD to boot to the recovery console and use the commands:

chkdsk c: /r
fixboot c:
fixmbr

Use the first command and then reboot to test if it boots before moving on to the next one.